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What is the future of the workplace? Co-working is increasing in popularity and office design is changing. What is a passing trend and what is a signal of permanent change? I spent a few months in 2018 working at JLL’s downtown Minneapolis office, complete with its standing desks, huddle rooms, a collaboration room (my kids liked it for the video games!) and more robust kitchen area typical of modern office buildouts. Perkins & Will’s downtown Minneapolis offices in the IDS take the concept a bit further, with a more modern and austere feel, exposed ceilings and open seating rather than…

Everywhere we went on our recent trip to Chile our family could count on one thing: the town square. Up and down Chile, in any weather and any geography, big city and small village, we spent time in and around the town square. Day or night, we found them to be pleasant and active, with programming and informal gathering, something to bring all ages together. In Santiago, the capital of Chile, the Plaza de Armas was full of people one mid afternoon. The square is ringed by lovely old buildings with a distinctly European, particularly Spanish look. Indeed, the European…

If you can order a coffee from a window while standing on a sidewalk, you just might be in a great urban place. On a recent trip to Santiago, Chile, I walked out of our AirBnB and just up the sidewalk was a coffee shop with a window facing the sidewalk. The street happened to be Calle Jose Victorino Lastarria in the historic Barrio Lastarria district, but it could have been anywhere. Requirements include a street with slow vehicle traffic, a decent sidewalk, buildings with little or no setback, and a decent amount of pedestrian traffic. Travel the world, and…

I took my mother to the Oak Grill in January. We needed to see the place one last time. Share one last popover. And a manhattan. I’m embarrassed to say I’d never been. So for me eating at the Oak Grill was a new experience in downtown Minneapolis. Looking around the dining room that day I suspect I was the only one for whom this was true. For them, a piece of downtown died last month. I’m not sure what it meant for me. The downtown I miss is shown in the photo above. Sure, I did shop at Dayton’s and…

As a follow-up to the critique of a recent post about the urban design of Harriet’s Inn, let’s consider the parts of the city that inspire us and the standards to which we should be aspiring. To do so, we need only look past Harriet’s Inn, as well as the gold standard for old urbanism in the Twin Cities, Linden Hills. Assisting us is a really great recent how-to guide on urban storefronts by Steve Mouzon at Original Green. Looking up the Lyndale Avenue and across 40th Street from Harriet’s Inn (above) is the kind of streetcar-era mixed-use building that…

At first blush, the new Harriet’s Inn at 40th Street and Lyndale Avenue in south Minneapolis is a nice addition to the city and its urban fabric. Jucy Lucy’s on the menu, Polygamy on a nitro tap, kids eat free on Tuesdays, what could go wrong!? Furthermore, the building has an attractive brick facade, big windows, is built close to the sidewalk and corner, and replaces a SuperAmerica with a big parking lot. An urbanists dream? Far from it. The first thing I noticed is that the restaurant patio is located along the north side of the building, actually hidden…

With a grocery store proposed as part of a mixed-use development at 46th and Hiawatha (see the Planning Commission submittal to the Committee of the Whole last week for plans), it is time to review good urban standards for grocery store design. Grocery stores are complicated due to issues of customer access, parking, and truck delivery, and walkability and good urban design is sometimes sacrificed. Let’s look at some considerations for the 46th Street store. We’ll begin with the Lunds & Byerlys on University Avenue in northeast Minneapolis. This store is in many ways the gold standard for urban grocery stores…

If there is a billion dollar view to be had in Minnesota, it is from the concourse above the lower bowl on the east side of the stadium. There I stood last Wednesday, leaning one of those tall tables that line the concourses, beer in hand, gazing across the immaculate grass field toward the downtown Minneapolis skyline. The early evening sun was streaming in the huge west windows, casting long shadows on the soccer pitch, shining on me and several other fans as we excitedly awaited kickoff between Chelsea and A.C. Milan. It was cool to be part of this…

Front doors are an important part of the urban landscape. Irish doors may be the most famous example (just Google it). I have successfully advocated for front doors in the past, and I even came up with the GDA, or Gehl Door Average, based on Jan Gehl’s book Cities for People, whereby only when there are 10 or more doors per 100 meters of street frontage can you consider it “friendly.” Gehl isn’t simply calling for more doors, but rather that doors add to the quality of our “eye-level” experience of place, and designing doors properly is key to making streets and cities more walkable. Today we’ll be looking at urban…